Prior to Williams’s star turn as the blue-skinned, wise-cracking spirit in a bottle, above-the-title stars simply did not lend their voices to animated films. Do you recognize, for example, any of the following names, all of whom did voice work for Disney’s previous films, The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991): Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson, Richard White? Anyone? Anyone? Unless you’re a Disney animation buff, probably not. Those films did feature some recognizable names in supporting roles—namely comedian Buddy Hackett as the seagull Scuttle in Little Mermaid and British thespian Angela Lansbury as the tea kettle Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast, but neither of them are exactly known for headlining blockbusters and filling theaters on name value alone.

Williams, on the other hand, was fresh off a string of critically acclaimed performances in widely popular films such as Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), Awakenings (1990), and Hook (1991) (okay, the last one wasn’t so critically acclaimed, but it was a sizable hit at the box office). His casting as the Genie not only had a profound impact on the kind of film Aladdin turned out to be, but completely changed the manner in which animated films were cast. Soon thereafter, animated films from both Disney and its competitors were lining up more and more famous stars to stand behind microphones. The Lion King (1994), Disney’s follow-up to Aladdin, landed Oscar winner Jeremy Irons as the film’s villain and former teen star Matthew Broderick and then-current teen star Jonathan Taylor Thomas as the hero at different ages. Hercules (1997) also featured a cast list of familiar, albeit not powerhouse, names, including James Woods, Danny DeVito, and Hal Holbrook, as did Mulan (1998), which followed explicitly in Aladdin’s footsteps by casting Eddie Murphy as a wise-cracking dragon. However, it was DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek (2001) a few years later that really threw down the gauntlet by casting former Saturday Night Live star Mike Myers at the height of his creative and commercial power as the titular ogre, Cameron Diaz as his love interest, and, once again, Eddie Murphy as a wiseacre sidekick, this time a donkey named Donkey. One can sense the difference in the marketing, with those star-power names hanging above the title on the one-sheet, a practice that is now common in selling animated films.

And it all comes back to Robin Williams, who nine years earlier infused Aladdin with his reckless sense of fast-talking comic abandon, giving it a completely different feel from Disney’s previous films. Bear in mind, of course, that Disney was again on the ascent after several decades of animated misfires, underperformers, and absolute bombs, so it is not insignificant that the filmmakers were willing to tinker with the formula, even as they maintained its most salient characteristics, especially the deployment of Broadway-style musical numbers throughout the film.

The Genie himself looks a bit like Robin Williams, which makes the association between star and character all the stronger. Although he doesn’t show up until 35 minutes into the 90-minute film and is absent from the screen for significant stretches, the Genie is the film’s dominant character and arguably the reason Aladdin was such a massive hit in the ’92 Christmas season. Although the screenplay is credited to Little Mermaid veterans Ron Clements and John Musker (who also directed) and future Pirates of the Caribbean scribes Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, all of the Genie’s dialogue is pure Williams improv, suffused with sarcastic asides, witty wordplay, celebrity impersonations, and rapid-fire pop culture references. In the Genie’s first two minutes on screen, he turns his smoky tail into a microphone, conducts himself like a television emcee, and impersonates Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, and the Kryptonian villains of Superman (1978). It’s a whirlwind performance that turns the film into the Robin Williams Show, for better or for worse, depending on your perspective.

To backtrack a bit, Aladdin borrows a few characters and plot lines from the original folktale, but is mostly wholly invented. Aladdin (Scott Weinger) is a so-called “street rat,” a young man living from hand to mouth in the ancient Persian city of Agrabah with his monkey sidekick Abu (it seems like everyone in the film has an animal sidekick, ranging from a tiger to a parrot voiced by Gilbert Gottfried). Aladdin, ever the romantic, sets his sights on Princess Jasmine (Linda Larkin), who has run away from the palace because she is tired of her well-meaning, but bumbling father, the Sultan (Douglas Seale), trying to coax her into marrying a suitable suitor who, by law, must be a prince. The Sultan is being manipulated by his top advisor, the nefarious Jafar (Jonathan Freeman), who is secretly searching for the Genie’s lamp, which has been hidden for 10,000 years and can only be retrieved (for reasons that never entirely made clear) by Aladdin. When Aladdin unleashes the Genie, he uses the first of his three wishes to become a prince and therefore be eligible to woo Jasmine, which he goes about in all the wrong ways, thus learning the crucial lessons of being honest and true to yourself. The film culminates in an action-packed sequence reminiscent of the end of The Little Mermaid, with Jafar stealing the lamp and using the Genie to gain unlimited power for himself.

One would be hard pressed to imagine what Aladdin would be like without Williams’s presence, which is testament to how central he is to the film’s tone and style. Granted, the songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (with Tim Rice filling in as lyricist after Ashman died of AIDS during production) are among some of their best, bursting with energy and humor (or, in the case of “A Whole New World,” pure, unadulterated, romantic gush). The animation is also quite wonderful, even if the nascent mixture of traditional hand-drawn and computer-generated images don’t mesh very well. The film is bright and colorful and energetic, and it even finds room to chip away at the staid notion of the helpless Disney princess by infusing Jasmine with a sense of independent-minded pride that compels her to resist the male-dominated social structure in which she is trapped (which seems to dictate both her love life and her midriff-baring attire), although she does, of course, accede to romantic love in the end. The Genie stands out so much because the film’s title character is a bit of a bore, but perhaps that is out of necessity so he doesn’t compete in any way with Williams’s rat-a-tat shtick. Aladdin is, for all intents and purposes, the straight man, even though several early sequences attempt to position him as nimble action hero (his initial approach to the lamp in the Cave of Wonders is a direct homage to the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark). He plays his role well enough, but it’s the Genie for whom people came and who drives their return, thus cementing his status as a genuine cinematic game-changer.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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